(1) Thu Sep 03 2009 22:01Kafka For The Easily Bored:
I just read a bunch of Franz Kafka--everything of his except the novels. Let me tell you, there's a lot of boring stuff in that corpus. But there's not so much stuff, total, that you could put together a "just the good parts" anthology that could compete with the complete short works. Especially since the ideal length for a Kafka story is about one page. For me a good Kafka story is like a good Lovecraft story: it knocks you over and runs away.

So I thought I'd share my list of the Kafka stories that I thought were really good, so that you don't have to go through a bunch of stuff that just flails at you without knocking you over. I've added links to translations, when I could find them.